4.4. Alternative 4: Using the GATOS Project's Latest Driver

The GATOS project is an independent developer team. They develop drivers and utilities for ATI cards. To install their driver with DRI-support, you need to download it from here. Download the ati.2 file for your appropriate XFree86 version. You also need a set of files to enable dri support. These files are called the drm-kernel module. They can only be downloaded from CVS. To download them, issue the following commands:

cvs -d:pserver:anonymous at cvs.gatos.sourceforge.net:/cvsroot/gatos login
cvs -z3 -d:pserver:anonymous at cvs.gatos.sourceforge.net:/cvsroot/gatos co drm-kernel

You are now ready to install the driver. Type the following commands to install it:

cd drm-kernel/
make -f Makefile.linux
cp radeon.o /lib/modules/`uname -r`/kernel/drivers/video/gatosdrm.o
modprobe gatosdrm

You now need to make Linux load the module gatosdrm each time at startup. To do this, find out where your Linux distribution keeps the list of modules to load at startup and add the line gatosdrm to the end of that file (in Debian, the file is /etc/modules).

You are now ready to install the GATOS driver for the Radeon card. To do so, type the following commands:

cd /usr
tar zxvf /path/to/name-of-ati.2-package.tar.gz

The driver is now installed.

You are now ready to configure XFree86. This can be done by running xf86config, or by editing the XFree86 configuration file manually. The configuration process is the same as for XFree86's own driver in Section 4.1, so go back to that point and follow the XFree86 configuration process described there.

You are now ready to run XFree86!